First opened Tuesday, December 20, 2011
老いる
おいる
- middle-high (nakadaka): falls after mora 2
How to read it: a line over a kana means the voice is high there, and ↓ marks where it drops. A kana with no line is low. With no ↓ the pitch stays high to the end and does not drop even on a following particle (が, は).
to age, to grow old
Oiru is from the Old Japanese verb 老ゆ (oyu).
Taken apart
No breakdown is shown for this word: Wiktionary's text for it doesn't give a split that spells the word and joins to its reading, and any other split would be a guess.
Written with 老
In a sentence
おいては子に従え。
The old generation must make way for the new.
彼女は老いた母の世話をした。
She looked after her old mother.
Sentences are from Tatoeba (CC BY 2.0 FR), picked by fixed rules from a dated export and shown unchanged. Nobody has reviewed them one by one.
What Wiktionary says
Quoted line by line from Wiktionary's Etymology section for this reading, taken from one dated dump so it can't change underneath us. Nothing below is paraphrased.
- “From Old Japanese verb 老ゆ (oyu).”
- “Development”
- “Natural progression from Old and Classical Japanese 上(かみ)二(に)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami nidan katsuyō, “upper bigrade conjugation”) verbs ending in -u to modern Japanese 上(かみ)一(いち)段(だん)活(かつ)用(よう) (kami ichidan katsuyō, “upper monograde conjugation”) verbs ending in -iru.”
Source: Wiktionary: 老いる (dump of 2026-09-02), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Reading, meaning and part of speech from JMdict, and kanji readings from KANJIDIC2 (EDRDG).
What the labels mean
- 和語 Native Japanese
- Words that were already Japanese before Chinese vocabulary arrived — usually written with kun'yomi and often short.